Watch Those Icicles Form
by Omnicat
Summary: Jane goes to bed warm and cozy and wakes up to the sound of her own chattering teeth.


**Title:** Watch Those Icicles Form

 **Author:** Omnicat

 **Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge:** MCU's Thor and Thor-related movies.

 **Warnings:** None.

 **Characters & Relationships:** Loki x Jane

 **Summary:** Jane goes to bed warm and cozy and wakes up to the sound of her own chattering teeth. **/ 1350 words**

 **Author's Note:** Written for keydav/Mo_Eckles in the Lokane Christmas Gift Exchange 2018. Enjoy!

 **II-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-I-oOo-I-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-II**

 **Watch Those Icicles Form**

The fog of sleep, no matter how thick, was no match for the cold Jane woke up to. No, not even the cold itself: it was the chattering of her teeth that woke her. She was freezing, her whole body stiff and trembling, and when she turned her head her pillow crackled with frost.

"L-l-l-loki?" she stuttered through cramping jaws.

His form was still beside her. In the dark, she couldn't see if he was awake or asleep. She reached out to shake his shoulder, to no effect whatsoever. He was _so cold_ though. Her icy fingers came away from the contact with his silk pyjamas even colder. It was almost as if... oh hell...

With stilted movements, Jane turned over and flipped on her bedside light. When she looked at Loki again, he was blue.

She rubbed her eyes.

Loki was still blue.

"Wow," she breathed.

Then she grabbed one of the books on her night stand to prod him awake with the hard, pokey corners.

"Lok-k-ki. Loki. Wake u-up!"

Finally, he roused, blindly shying away from the hardcover digging into his spleen. "Mm? Whah?"

"W-w-wake up. You're b-b-blue!"

" _Wah?_ "

He rolled over to face her, eyes shut tightly against the light. He didn't seem to notice anything amiss, so he took his sweet time dragging himself out of dreamland.

"You're. _Blue,_ " Jane managed to force out, and rolled out of bed, away from the freezing element beneath her sheets. She stamped her feet and wrapped her arms around herself. "L-look at your h-hands."

Frowning muggily, Loki raised his blue, black-nailed, strangely patterned hands to his face – and let out a high-pitched scream.

 **I-oOo-I**

Half an hour later, in the living room, Jane had barricaded herself in a cocoon of winter clothes and blankets around the extra space heater she used when she was on the road for research, and Loki was pacing in front of the open sliding doors, stripped down to his boxers. Flurries of snow blew in around him. He was holding a gadget strongly reminiscent of a rune-engraved golden ear thermometer to his ear, and had been for the past five minutes.

"I would've thought magic medical diagnostics would be faster than this," Jane commented.

"Some of it is," he said tersely. "Some of it relies on ambient magic for power, which was a good idea as long as we lived on Asgard where the air was thick with it, but not so much here and now, on Earth."

"Can't it feed off of you instead?"

"As if that wasn't the first thing I tried. But it –"

The golden gizmo beeped the exact same beep Jane's ear thermometer made when it was finished taking her temperature. Loki pulled it away from his ear, read the tiny rune diagnosis from the display screen, and let out a breath of relief.

"It's a pesky but ultimately harmless shapeshifter virus. It manifests as a mild cold and an inability to shift away from one's natural state – or rather, birth state. I must have caught it one of the times we were out grocery shopping earlier this week."

Jane frowned. Eyeing the snow still floating in through sliding doors and burrowing deeper into her pile of clothing and bedding, she asked: "But how do you catch a virus like that?"

"From other infected shapeshifters, of course," Loki laughed. "This infection makes one contagious days before symptoms start to manifest."

"Well, sure, but _what other infected shapeshifters?_ This is Earth, there are no –" She froze and looked at him. He raised an eyebrow at her. "– there _are?_ "

Loki, clearly cured of the worst of the distress caused by his sudden reversal to his Jotun form, smirked. "What, did you think that just because you can't tell they're shapeshifters, they're not there?"

"No, I thought 'this is Earth and in the cosmic scheme we're too boring for that'," Jane shot back.

"You haven't been boring for years, my dear Jane. But this was probably just a Skrull. They're everywhere."

Jane's eyes narrowed. "Excuse me, what?"

"Skrull," Loki repeated blithely, and vanished his ear thermometer. "Alien race of natural shapeshifters hell-bent on intergalactic destruction. Don't worry though, their tenaciousness is matched only by their incompetence. Now, this virus on the other hand..."

"Oh no, no no no." Jane pulled one gloved hand from the safety of her nest to point an accusing finger at him. "You do not get to tell me shapeshifting alien invaders may have infiltrated _my_ planet and then just change the subject."

"They're harmless, Jane, I assure you. Everybody knows about them. Asgard, Xandar, the Kree, the bleeding Chitauri. Hel, even your SHIELD knew about it. The only ones who don't know just how well-known they are, are the Skrulls themselves."

"Good catch: SHIELD _knew_ about it. SHIELD's gone. Who knows now?"

"Every man, woman and other creature formerly of SHIELD with a functioning memory, for one? The champion who curb-stomped their last attempt at conquering Earth?" Loki rolled his eyes and then knelt down before her, took the hand still laying atop her blankets, and pressed a kiss to it. "If it concerns you so much, very well, we'll speak of the Skrulls again at a later date. I'm not asking you to forget all about it, only to forget about it _for now_ and focus on _my_ problem instead."

Jane's mouth twisted wryly. "Typical."

Loki hesitated. "I really don't feel comfortable with this."

"Yeah, okay, I get it," Jane sighed. She squeezed his hand and then quickly pulled hers from his frigid grasp. "Fine. You first. What do you need?"

"Your love to keep me warm," Loki deadpanned. "Which I realize might prove problematic. How do you feel about a bit of impromptu heavy duty transformation magic?"

"Might tempt me if I've had my eight hours of sleep, but not at four in the morning." She cocked her head. "Is that even gonna work if you can't even transform yourself right now, though?"

"I won't know until I try."

"Unless and until I agree and you pull it off, you'll have to sleep on the couch, though."

"Of course. I understand."

But there was a painful vulnerability in his expression that pulled at Jane's heartstrings. Loki didn't _like_ to talk about it, but she'd heard enough about the circumstances and cultural context of his adoption to understand what an unpleasant shock waking up all blue and sub-zero must have been.

It might just be on par with the sinking suspicion that if she hadn't woken up when she did, she could've lost a couple of toes.

"C'mere," she said, opening her arms even though she knew _at least_ one of them would regret it.

Loki leaned in for the hug and held her very tightly and very coldly. When he pulled his face away from her neck, there was sweat at his temples and rime in her hair. Loki eyed it unhappily.

"Let me kiss you. I'll leave you be for the rest of the week if you so wish, but I want a proper goodbye if so," he said.

 _Sweettalker,_ Jane thought fondly.

She leaned in, changed her mind, and jerked her head back to dab at her lips with her sleeve. Loki looked confused.

"I licked the pole _once_. Never again," she said.

Now he looked utterly bewildered. _"Licked the pole?"_

"Never mind."

Jane pressed their lips together in a chaste, closed-mouthed kiss. It was frosty and made her breath fog between them, but something primal in her gut reveled in the moan it drew from Loki.

She let go.

His mouth did not let go of her. _His_ lips, she realized belatedly, had _not_ been carefully cleaned of any moisture that may have coated them.

"Oh, _shid_ ," she groaned. Pressing back in, she grabbed his shoulders to keep him from making any ill-advised movements. "Oww, oww, Logi gemme hod wader, quig, quig."

He blew out a surprised breath. " _Oh._ You meand you'd 'kissed de fwozen bwade' onge!"

"Kidchen," Jane ordered, her lips pulling at where they'd gotten stuck to his with every word. "Now."


End file.
